"If there is anyone who can sell change as steadiness, or steadiness as change, it is Bill Clinton. After his speech Tuesday night, there was some difference of opinion on whether he still has the old magic. But to convince voters that Hillary Clinton, running for what amounts to a third term of the Obama administration, is in fact a change maker will perhaps require more magic than Bill ever had."

"If only we could get to know the real Hillary Clinton.

"Unveiling the Hillary we supposedly don't know has been the perpetual, elusive goal of Clinton's handlers for decades, with the Democratic convention in Philadelphia the latest stab at it. ...

"Over 25 years, the public surely has attained an accurate-enough picture of Hillary Clinton. They may not know all the details of her advocacy work as a young woman, but they have seen her smash-mouth partisanship, her grating insincerity, her gross money-grubbing, her serial dishonesties, her cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof caution, and her grind-out ambition that has lacked a light touch or any poetry.

"Hillary always points out how she is a target for attack, but the two controversies that have dogged her in the past year were entirely of her own doing. No enemy of hers forced her to circumvent the rules to try to keep her official e-mails off the grid, or to take $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for three speeches. She did this to herself -- because she thought she could get away with it."

"Philadelphia -- Could the presidential election be decided by two competing 'October Surprises' based on leaked information?

"One from WikiLeaks could involve the deleted e-mails from Hillary Clinton's private server and could be related to the FBI's ongoing investigation of the Clinton Foundation. Another could involve the leaking of confidential tax-return information regarding Donald Trump, who has steadfastly refused to release his returns even as he demanded to see the returns of people seeking to be his vice-presidential running mate. ...

"No one knows for sure whether October surprises of leaked information are headed our way this fall. But clearly anything is possible in this cut-throat year of political surprises. That's why polls are only of so much use -- they may be dramatically overcome by events on the ground."

"Disruptive. That's a good word to describe Donald Trump's presidential candidacy, and to describe the sometimes ramshackle Republican National Convention his campaign more or less superintended in Cleveland this past week. ...

"Over history America has mostly been built by disruption. ...

"Maybe some disruption from a candidate who says he has 'no tolerance for government incompetence' is in order."

"Although polls show that the race is tight and that Hillary Clinton is widely viewed as dishonest, she enjoys an Electoral College advantage, as well as a personal one. Her proximity to presidential power and decades in top government positions make it easier for many voters to at least imagine her sitting in the Oval Office.

"More than a majority of voters say they simply cannot imagine Trump as president. His challenge, then, is to change millions of minds with the speech of his life.

"He should not try to be all things to all people, but he must reveal a man fully ready to lead the nation for all occasions."

"The repeated exoneration of allegedly racist cops by minority jurors and judges -- from Ferguson and Staten Island to Cleveland and now Baltimore -- seriously undermines the anti-cop movement started by Black Lives Matter and fueled by President Obama.

"With half the Baltimore cops now acquitted in the death of Freddie Gray, a pattern has emerged where highly publicized cases against cops for racially motivated murder of black suspects have crumbled under the weight of court evidence. ...

"Judges and jurors are debunking charges of 'systemic racism' in policing as another of the left's many false narratives. But the damage may already be done, evidenced by the vicious war on cops and a related violent crime wave in major cities across the country."

"More bad news about the Iran nuclear deal landed Monday -- a dangerous secret President Obama has been keeping from the American people.

"The Associated Press reports that the unpublished side deal is even more disastrous than the rest of the accord. It relaxes key restrictions on Iran's nuclear program in just over a decade, rather than the 15 years Team Obama has been touting. ...

"Since agreeing to the deal, Iran has kept on testing ballistic missiles that can deliver nuclear warheads. It's also been caught in clandestine efforts to illicitly acquire high-level nuclear technology and equipment.

"It's becoming alarmingly clear that Team Obama played the American people -- and the congressional Democrats who supported the deal -- for fools."

"The worst-kept secret in Washington, D.C. is that Congress will once again fail to do its most basic constitutional job and pass legislation to fund the federal government beyond the end of the current fiscal year on September 30.

"Although both party's leaders are slow to admit it, the annual fight over $4 trillion of federal funding is heading down a now-familiar path. Lawmakers will lurch toward a government shutdown, pass a temporary continuing resolution to keep federal doors open, and eventually agree to a last-minute omnibus funding bill -- a massive trillion dollar-plus package riddled with waste and cobbled together without public scrutiny or congressional debate.

"And lawmakers wonder why their approval ratings hover in the teens.

"Worse, Republicans will take the blame, because they run Congress. What a policy and political debacle a few weeks before the November elections."

"Tom Brady has been held more accountable 4deflating footballs than Hillary for lying, evading transparency laws & risking national security."

"The United States appears to be entering another era of dangerous internal instability similar to the one it endured in the 1960s-1970s. ...

"Our enemies increasingly may gamble that provocations won't elicit a U.S. reaction. Or that even if America did respond, the resulting domestic divisions and turmoil would diminish the effectiveness of the response.

"Add to the equation record debt and vast cuts in the defense budget, and our enemies may conclude that we are Rome of AD 500, Britain of the late 1940s, or Russia of the 1980s.

"To be blunt, America's vulnerable post-war global order may already seem to those abroad to be bloated carrion ready to be picked apart by opportunistic vultures."